smart move IMO. instead of wasting money on developing newer tech to compete each year, they are spending it on a longer term project. hopefully this will pay off and will yeild good results.

also they are saving money by not making newer fabrication methods.

only risk is will their pupolarity be tarnished when nvidia releases new GPUs this year?
i know there are a lot of people who will say "look at AMD, they are crappy, so they didnt release new gpus this year. nvidia FTW," bla bla.

It's likely that the GTX Titan will be the only new card before Christmas unless something unexpected happens.

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Since the Tesla cards have been out for some time, I wouldn't exactly call this Titan a new card. It's a new SKU, but the card already exists, the GPU already exists, and systems built with it are available right now.

Just not in Geforce clothing.

IF anyone is shocked that Titan is coming, they've not been paying much attention. The Telsa K20X has 2688 shaders and 384-bit memory. GTX680 has 1536 and 256-bit. GTX690 is 3072 shaders and 256-bit.

I find it hard to grasp how less shaders than GTX690 is going to be so much faster than GTX690, as rumoured. The $899 pricing, now, that makes a lot of sense, based on shader count.

With that said, I see no reason for AMD to launch anything any time soon. I suspect they may ALSO have a larger GPU they can launch on 28nm, if needed, but building cards for that price point, well, is not were the real money is.

I hope to see HD 7950 drop to $229. 7970 to $279, and 7970 GHz @ $329. IF this happens, AMD will be quite well off, and this would match what they are doing with Piledriver right now.

I don't expect real new GPUs until just before, or just after new consoles launch.

no amd has no card to counter the titan but this is the thing they might not need to counter it directly power for power like they did with the 7970, as games are optimized for the amd only consoles as a side effect games will simply be optimized moreso for amd gpu's then nvidia's I beleive and nvidia is preparing for this with larger gpu's.

If I were a developer having to develop for a PS4, 720, WiiU and PC and I could optimize all 4 platforms to on AMD's gpu platform since they are similar, I'm going to optimize all 4 for AMD and not nvidia and thats just how it goes.

I hope AMD can pull some resources away from the their gpu development and put some towards their cpu's.

The 7970 basic version is slower than the GTX680. However the clocks are so differentiated it hurts. Nvidia (in the past few years) has always released gfx cards clocked slower than ATI. But due to their monolithic die size and transistor counts, tended to perform quite a bit better than ATI.

This time AMD released the 7970 with clocks that were far too conservative. Nvidia (more than likely) made great use of their usual, late to the table, card by tweaking the clocks skyward. Why else are they voltage locked? Adaptive V-sync and the massive clocks are more than likely reaching their boards power limits.

AMD react with their GHz edition cards (lame quite frankly). Now the 7970 clocked at the boost speeds of the 680 does tend to win on most occasions. But on Nvidia's side is a 'generally' better driver team. If AMD piled their resources into driver development and created better gaming development strategies (like Nvidia does) you;d probably see the 7970 cards humping all over the 680.
The 7970 is a much more powerful card than the 680 but it is far less refined. For a change Nvidia have the sleek purring kitten and AMD has the brute growler. A card is only as good as it's hardware AND software and AMD have the hardware battle won for now but not the software one.

However, if the GTX Titan is not a myth then it will more than likely piss over the 7970. But, given the rumours it will only be for show. It will be like the Ares 2 7970 card.

Also, to add to what many sensible people have said, there is no need for new gfx cards this year. The 680 and the 7970 are excellent cards. Driver tweaking will keep them well up to speed with all the new games.

It is a sign of confidence to not rush out a new product - not weakness. And the Titan is simply a technology argument from Nvidia (probably a very bloody good one too).

Both AMD and Nvidia have done enough with graphics recently. They need to sit back and work on other areas now, software, mobile, coding assistance. I'd much rather keep a card that can work on new games because they're coded better than have to buy new cards because of substandard coding.

I find playing BF3 at 2560x1440 with ALL FX maxed out with 80-100+ fps is more than enough on two 7970's. Why the hell do i want more powerful cards?

I'd really like to see some new launches in 2013. If not faster, at least more power efficient. There is always room for improvement there. I'm on a previous generation GPU. I'm not too enthusiastic to upgrade for the sake of 10-30% GPU horsepower. But if that was combined with an additional 10-30% improved power efficiency, then I would have reason to upgrade.

IF anyone is shocked that Titan is coming, they've not been paying much attention.

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GK110 was the card I wanted early last year when it was supposed to be the GTX 680, but then Nvidia royally screwed the pooch on that one and I have no interest in a $900 version of that chip unless it manages to at least match my 7970 CF performance.

AMD has to sell what they have now and I guess they have a pretty hard time since they cut prices on their cards countless times and are now at the second games bundle offer. On the other hand the market doesn't quite need new cards to flood the market. If people have a PC in the house then it's good enough, they'll buy a mobile piece of hardware next. Even Microsoft is trying desperately to move away from the desktop so what can we expect?

GK110 was the card I wanted early last year when it was supposed to be the GTX 680, but then Nvidia royally screwed the pooch on that one and I have no interest in a $900 version of that chip unless it manages to at least match my 7970 CF performance.

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If it matches 7970 CF performance I will be impressed and may grab one, but I highly doubt it comes close to that, especially since 7970 drivers are really hitting their climax in the coming months.

I find it hard to grasp how less shaders than GTX690 is going to be so much faster than GTX690, as rumoured. The $899 pricing, now, that makes a lot of sense, based on shader count.

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Im betting on at least same performance, if not slightly better than the 690.

If we multiply 3072 shaders by 80%, which is a generous figure for SLI scaling IMO, that's the equivalent of less than 2500 shaders. And that's without knowing if GK110's shaders might have higher IPC compared to GK104's.

AMD has to sell what they have now and I guess they have a pretty hard time since they cut prices on their cards countless times and are now at the second games bundle offer.

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You can also say GK110 didnt sell that well and Nvidia has to offload inventory so selling them in GeForce variants is a way to recoupe that R&D money.

They also have a Quaterly report coming on the Feb 13, Since SEC 2013 didnt workout to well for them its time for the hype machine to drum up investor interest.
I suspect the HYPE will continue all the way to there GPU Tech Conf. on March 13-18.

That is not an unknown. Telsa cards tell the full story about the Titan card. There's no mystery at all with this chip. And rumours and such are just traffic generators.

Like I hate to be a realist here, but really, there's no reason for any of the mystery here. NONE. the only mystery is final clockspeeds.

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85% performance of a GTX690. The most reasonable high expectation. Fantastic performance nonetheless. Price is a different discussion but I guess they can ask whatever they want since the only card to compare to is also Nvidia and it's a 1000$ card.

There is some mystery as to how exactly it's going to perform in games, but overall I agree with you. I do think there's good reason to believe the "85% of 690 performance" rumors.

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I agree, and the pricing rumoured reflects this as well. It's a very simple that they have been binning chips for these cards for months now, and the rest probably went into the Tesla cards. I kind of expect a 900 or 950 MHz sort of clock, like the other Geforce cards, and then shader count answers the rest.

Ram bandwidth increase could bring a decent gains a well, but since there is more shaders added, that bandwidth maybe already be utilized by those shaders.

So, why would AMD release anything to counter that? They have a clear intent already of not taking performance crowns, so why would that change?

So, why would AMD release anything to counter that? They have a clear intent already of not taking performance crowns, so why would that change?

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I agree. The Titan isn't set to compete with anything or to put pressure on anything. It's just going to add one more niche option to the market and assuming SLI works, will provide a KILLER setup for anyone looking to drop ~$2K on graphics cards .

If AMD isn't releasing a new card then neither will nvidia. They benefited so tremendously from being second to market that they'll want to do it again. I guess the only graphics event in 2013 will be the Titan replacing the 690. Nice not having to get new hardware every 6 months I suppose.